From the course: Revit: Rendering

Aligning wood textures

From the course: Revit: Rendering

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Aligning wood textures

- [Instructor] In a previous video in this chapter, we talked about how to align the textures within materials to the nearby geometry. And, we did that using the fill patterns that were assigned to those materials. And we could use the move or rotate, or align commands to help us make those adjustments. Now that works great for materials that have fill patterns, but what about materials that don't have fill patterns? And one of the most obvious examples that comes to mind wood grain. So, what I've got here in this model is three examples of wood grain that I want to show you some techniques that we can use to solve this problem. So, I'm going to zoom in over here and I've got a wall here that's just a copy of a generic wall, and it's assigned to a wood material. Then I've got a component family here, which is a generic model, also assigned to a wood material. And then back over here on my model, I have this fascia board and it is also using a wood material. Now, because those are three different kinds of objects, we're going to approach the process a little bit differently for each one. So let's start with the wall, which is the easiest one to solve. If I kind of pan the wall out of the way, go to Manage, go to Materials. And you'll see here that I have three different wood materials that I've created just to keep these separate. This one here called wood wall is the one that's assigned to this wall currently. And the easiest solution is to do exactly what we did in the previous video on this topic, and that is to assign a fill pattern to it. Now, it needs to be a model pattern, and you want something that follows the current wood grain. So the wood grain is running vertically along this wall. So if I scroll through here, I'm looking for some parallel lines running vertically, and I don't have one. So let me just create a new one. And I'll just go with the same name there, wood wall. And I'll make this 90 degrees, and I don't really care about the spacing, so I'll just accept the default. Let's click OK a few times, and then to see that we need to switch to a view that shows the hatch pattern, and not the textures. So now it's as simple as tabbing in to these lines, and you could do all of the same things that we did in the previous video. I could move them, I could align them, I could rotate them. Now since rotate is going to be the most obvious, let's just do that. And I'll just pick some random rotation here. And then when I go back to realistic, you can see that the wood grain is now following that rotation. The only bad thing about this technique is you have to have that hatch pattern on there. So in views that don't want to see the hatch pattern, what you could do is go to Visibility Graphics, and go to that category, Walls in this case. Scroll down, and override the surface pattern, and just hide the pattern. And when I click Apply, the pattern would disappear. But, back here in realistic, it would still be rotated. That could work, but of course, hiding the fill pattern may not be a good solution because it's going to hide everywhere. So then you have to start getting into, well, maybe instead of hiding globally, what I need to do is select this individual object, and use the override by element. And then I could hide the surface pattern of just this wall, so that wall disappears, but the brick pattern remains on the other walls. So again, there's a way to get there, and it works, but it's a little bit of a workaround, and not terribly satisfying. Let's look at the box next. So we already kind of know what to do, right? Like we'll just select the box, we'll edit the type. We'll go into that material. We've got it selected here. We'll apply that same model pattern that we just created, just for simplicity. And, now we will rotate that pattern, right? Well, unfortunately when you try to rotate this, it actually tries to rotate the entire object. So even though I've tabbed in and selected an individual line within the fill pattern, it's not going to allow me to do that. And the same is going to be true on the fascia. It's not going to allow me to do that as well. So generally you'll only be able to use that direct manipulation of the surface pattern technique with overall system families like walls, floors, roofs, those kinds of objects. Now, this box is a component family. So, in order to make the same kind of modification to it, I would have to actually edit the family. That would put me in the family editor. Then I could tab in and select this surface, use rotate for example, rotate the wood grain. And I could even do this on each individual surface. So for example, if I wanted to spin the wood grain completely around on the top surface to show me the wood grain going along the length of the box, I could. So notice each surface is independent. And then of course I could load it back into the model here, overwrite the existing. You've already seen the hatch pattern adjust. And then when we're done, you will see the grain is now following the direction you specified. The only trouble with that is, if you have one box that you want the wood grain going one way and another box another way, then you're going to have to have two separate families for that. There's not going to be really any easy work around using that technique. So, the final workaround is to create multiple materials. Now, multiple materials will give you a little bit more flexibility in a few areas. First of all, it won't require a hatch pattern at all. So there won't be any need in the non-rendered views to hide that surface pattern, like we had to do with this wall over here, because it simply won't be there. So, that is an advantage, but the disadvantage is that that depending on how many various angles you need, you could end up with multiple versions of your material, which could become a little bit cumbersome to manage. So if we look at our wood trim over here, I have three different angles that I would need to satisfy. I have the steep eaves up here at the top roof. I have these more shallow ones down here. And then I have the horizontal members down along the edges there. So, what we could do is, we need to know what that angle is. And I'm going to open up the right elevation. And if we zoom in, you can see that the roof slopes at the top are 33.69 degrees. And the complementary angle of that is going to be 56.31. So what I'm going to do is go into my material browser and select my wood trim material. Right-click it and duplicate it. And I will just put in 56.3 there for the name, just to distinguish it. And then here on the Appearance tab, I need to rotate the texture. Now, we have three separate textures here. So click on them first, link the texture transforms. So I'm clicking on each one. And then you can go to any one of the three textures now, and there's a rotation angle here, and I'll put in 56.3. Enter that, you'll see the grain rotate there. I'll click Done, I'll click OK. And then I will now look here and you can see for at least one side of the angle, it looks pretty good. The wood grain is now following the direction of the left hand fascia board. But of course the one on the right is incorrect. So in order to do the complete effect, I would need to duplicate this again. And this one, I will call 112.6. Now, one thing I forgot to do back here in the Appearance is I went right in and changed the angle. And of course, it currently applies now to two other materials. So I actually have three copies of the wood trim. So what I really needed to do was duplicate that asset and call this 56 as well. This was what I've been talking about in a few other videos, where if you don't remember to do that, you could get yourself in trouble and get very frustrated. So here, this one, I will call 112.6. So I'm just doubling that angle. And then if you click on this, because I duplicated it from the 56.3 one, it should already have link texture transforms turned on. So that'll save us a step. And then I put in 112.6 here. Click done, click OK. And now what you have to do is select the fascia board, Add/Remove segments, and I'm going to remove every other segment. So those two, this one, and this one, and click finish. Then I will go back to architecture, add a new roof fascia, and select this edge, this edge, this edge, and this edge. And you can see it creates a new fascia there. Then I need to select that, Edit Type, Duplicate. I'll just call this 112 at the end, click OK. And then finally change it from wood trim to wood trim 112. Click OK and then my original now snapped back again because I had originally edited the non-copied version. So let's just fix that. And now finally, if we zoom in and take a look, you should see the final result here. So now you could see that the wood grain is following the direction of the angle on both sides. Now it looks like my angle, the 112 side, that one might be slightly off, but I could just go in and correct that angle a little bit. But that's the general idea. Now the trouble with this technique now is you have to do something here at these little end points. So you're going to have to stretch those down to extend every other one, to kind of close up those corners there. Unless keeping those open corners doesn't bother you. Admittedly, it's kind of a lot of busy work and a lot of extra steps to control the wood grain. But I think ultimately, even though I'm not crazy about the idea of having lots of duplicates of the same material, I think I like that technique the best because it allows us for the most amount of flexibility in terms of being able to assign those materials to the objects that need it. Instead of having to have a hatch pattern that I then have to hide, and all that other stuff. But at least now you have a few different ways that you can tackle the problem.

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